FERNAND BAUDIN PRIZE FOR THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOKS IN BRUSSELS AND WALLONIA

EXHIBITION OF THE PRIZE-WINNING BOOKS AND CATALOGUE LAUNCH Saturday
8 JUNE 2013, 4pm

The FERNAND BAUDIN PRIZE awards each year the Most Beautiful Books in Brussels and in Wallonia. By honouring the finest books, the Prize seeks to support and encourage contemporary bookmaking in Brussels and in Wallonia, and to highlight graphic design as a creative industry. The Prize is an opportunity to promote the know-how of the book professionals and artisans, to raise public awareness towards book design, and to instigate international exchanges. In 2013, they celebrate their fifth edition.

The 9 prize-winning books of the Fernand Baudin Prize 2012 will be on display and available for purchase at bookshop X Marks the Bökship from 8 June until 6 July 2013. Please join us for an informal meeting with the Award Winners and a discussion on the graphic and editorial concept of the new catalogue with graphic designers Coline Sunier and Charles Mazé.

For the first time since the creation of the Baudin Prize, the new catalogue honours FERNAND BAUDIN, the Belgian typographic designer, author and teacher. He was involved in various professional institutions in Belgium and abroad such as Graphica Belgica Prize, Rencontres de Lure or Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) of which he was the vice-president. His two authoritative books are La Typographie au tableau noir and L’Effet Gutenberg. Thanks to a close collaboration with Baudin’s wife and children, this book is a new reference work on Baudin, revealing exclusive documents from Fernand Baudin's archives kept in the rare books and manuscripts section at the Université libre de Bruxelles. The Dossier Fernand Baudin gathers correspondence with international book professionals and texts written or translated by Baudin, previously unreleased or published in various journals, or read in conferences internationally. This selection of texts, presented in a chronological order and covering a period going from 1958 to 1998, conveys a panorama of the ideas developed and advocated by the author all along his career: the history of writing and the education of handwriting in particular, the evolution of the graphic tools and his study of certain aspects of the history of publishing.

The exhibition will be punctuated with regular events throughout the month of June:
Saturday 8 June, 4pmFernand Baudin Prize Exhibition opening and catalogue launchIntroduction of the Baudin Prize and the talk with Coline Sunier and Charles Mazé, designers on the Fernadn Baudin catalogue followed by Q & A.

Between 2009 and 2010 Leen Voet realized 774 drawings based on the works of the painter Felix De Boeck (1898-1995). The complete series, originally drawn with pencil on A4 paper, are reproduced in the book called Felix.

Felix De Boeck, whose oeuvre initially functioned within a certain intellectual discourse, but who withdrew from the art scene to live a rural life, became stranded in pathos and dilettantism.

Leen
Voet's request to the FeliXart Museum for the full list of works that were originally donated by the artist to the township of Drogenbos and subsequently transferred to custodianship of the Flemish Community, led to the an image bank containing 774 pieces. In the works of this pioneer of modernism, who later evolved towards a tormented symbolism, the same motifs are being repeated over and over. Felix De Boeck made multiple copies of his own paintings. He constructed his compositions in full accordance with the geometric laws of the circle.

Each image found on the image bank is only drawn once. The time consuming operation of copying this body of works, with pencil on a standard A4 drawing paper, does not aim to reassess his oeuvre. Physical properties such as size are denied in the drawings; the formats of the pictures are levelled to become uniform; paint is translated into pencil lines; stripes obsessively fill the paper.

As part of the Fernand Baudin exhibition of prize-winning books from Brussels and Wallonia, Manuela Dechamps Otamendi, designer of ‘Post-City’ will be talking with Post Works designer Matthew Butcher about her award-winning publication and editioral design practice.

Manuela Dechamps Otamendi, is a Brussels based graphic designer where she has run her own company since 2006. She teaches at ERG: École de Recherche Graphique. She co-founded the studio SalutPublic in 2002 and taught at the Faculty of Architecture of The University of Liège from 2007 till 2012. She mainly works for the cultural sector and holds a special interest for architecture.

Her unique approach is guided by the quest for an inextricable bond between form and content. Her research process incorporates sensitivity to materials and production methods. The last 5 years she focused on editorial design and won several awards including The Fernand Baudin prize in 2012 for Post-City.

Post-City was the publication for the Luxembourg pavilion at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale entitled Futura Bold? Post-City: Considering the Luxembourg case. It is a speculative exploration of the future issues that cities of the 21st century will be facing. Using Luxembourg as a case study, Post-City seeks an attitude toward the forces of the urban environment instead of concluding with an urban proposal. Post-City poses pertinent questions that arise from Luxembourg’s urban conditions today.

Matthew Butcher is a designer working across the fields of architecture, art and performance art. He founded Post Works with Melissa Appleton in 2009. Recent projects and exhibitions by the practice include ‘Stage City’ (exhibited at the V&A Museum, Prague Quadrennial and the Royal Academy), ‘No Stop, Statue, Machine’ (shown at the ICA, London) and ‘Wash House Carnival Arena’ (exhibited in Guimarães, Portugal, as part of the city's 2012 European Capital of Culture art and architecture program). His work has been published in Art Review, The New York Times, The Architects Journal, RIBA Journal, Domus, Architecture Today, Blueprint and ICON Magazine. Matthew is also a lecturer in architecture and performance at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and is a co-founder and editor of the architectural newspaper P.E.A.R.: Paper for Emerging Architectural Research.